Derek Osbourne resigns as leader of Kingston Council after arrest

From the Kingston Guardian website this evening:

The leader of Kingston Council has been arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children. 

Councillor Derek Osbourne was arrested at his New Malden home on Tuesday morning. 

Councillor Liz Green, acting leader of Kingston Council, said: "Derek Osbourne has resigned from the Liberal Democrat group. 

"We are deeply shocked by these allegations but I am unable to comment further as we must now allow the police the time and space they need to investigate the allegations thoroughly and without prejudice."

Former leader of Harborough District Council suspended from ruling Conservative group

Councillor Mike Rook, the former leader of Harborough District Council, has been suspended from its ruling Conservative group, reports the Harborough Mail website:

It comes after Cllr Mike Rook, who stepped down as leader last month, sent a letter to the Mail criticising his successor Blake Pain for his conduct during a row last year over the development of a masterplan planning document which could see up to 1,800 homes built on land north west of Harborough. 

The issue led Cllr Rook to sack Cllr Pain as his deputy leader back in November. 

In a letter to the Mail this week, Cllr Rook said he sacked Cllr Pain not over his opposition to the homes, but because Cllr Pain’s actions were ‘undermining the administration from the inside’.

The report goes on to say that the letter will be published in full in tomorrow's paper.

It has been clear for a while that there are factions developing in the Harborough Tory group. I am told that two Conservative councillors were nominated as vice-chair of the planning committee last month. The Liberal Democrat members naturally abstained - indeed, they had probably brought popcorn.

The vote ended in a tie and the committee chair was forced to choose between his two Tory colleagues. Such fun!

John Hemming and Leah McGrath Goodman

The Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley meets the American journalist who was banned from Britain, apparently because she wanted to investigate the murkier aspects of Jersey life.

Gretton railway station

When I got off the bus at the Talbot Inn the queue for the festival bar in its garden was a long one, so I slipped away to find Gretton railway station.

Gretton is a large village with three shops, a post office stores and even a little coffee shop. For the traditionalists, there are stocks and a whipping post on the village green.

The station used to stand on a viaduct at the edge of the village. I don't know when it closed, but it is on the line north of Corby which is still open to freight and has always seen plenty of diverted passenger trains. There are even some passenger trains from St Pancras to Oakham and Melton Mowbray via Corby that pass through now.

The stone staircases to the station on either side of the viaduct are still there complete with their wooden handrails, and there is a tunnel just below track level that meant people could change platform without having to go down to street level. The station building, now a private house, is still there too.

And so back to the Talbot...

Six of the Best 360

Mark Pack writes on rediscovering and modernising community politics.

Labour was lazy in the South Shields by-election, but Strange Thoughts says it was the electoral system that was to blame: "Where was the incentive for Miliband to spend time and energy building a top notch campaign machine when he knew that his re-election was guaranteed? His energies would be much better spent elsewhere."

"The stand-off in Ankara about the future of a public park that is about to be handed over to developers has been treated by the media for what it says about the Turkish government and its relations with ordinary people. What the story really demonstrates is the vital importance of green spaces in people's lives." The Real Blog reminds us that all regimes try to develop poor people's parks.

"Not content with having his own private uniformed police force patrolling the streets of Newham, Sir Robin Wales has now set up his own Internet monitoring group." Read more on Forestgate.net.

Edwardian Promenade looks at the resurgence of interest in spiritualism during and immediately after the First World War.

Greene King has been accused of "cultural vandalism" over its rebranding of pub signs, reports Gizmodo.

Big Tobacco funds free-market think tanks

I was shocked - shocked - by this story from the Guardian last week:

Two of Britain's leading free-market thinktanks have been criticised for taking money from "big tobacco". The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) have received tens of thousands of pounds in funding from leading tobacco companies. 

Their admissions have dismayed health groups, which question the degree to which both organisations have influenced government thinking, especially on plain packaging for cigarettes. It also highlights the entrenched links between "big tobacco" and the libertarian strand of British politics that has been strengthened by the recent rise of Ukip, a party that has positioned itself firmly on the side of smokers.

The Spectator Archive

Launched yesterday, The Spectator Archive is a marvellous new online resource.

Every issue of the magazine from 1828 to 2008 has been scanned and digitised, and each article tagged and extracted. That means you can search the whole archive by content, keyword, topic, location and date.

Best of all, it is free to use.

Leicester in June

Stephen Williams says the public must get a share of the Lloyds and RBS sell-offs

A report on the Guardian website this evening quotes Stephen Williams, the Lib Dem MP for Bristol West, talking about how of Lloyds Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland should be returned to the public sector:

"My Lib Dem colleagues and I will not stand by and watch private investors reap all of the benefits once the banks are taken off taxpayer intensive care. The public must get their share."

Back in 2011 Stephen wrote a pamphlet for CentreForum which called for every British adult to be given shares in banks that had been rescued by the government.

At the time I quoted him talking to the BBC:

"Every citizen would have the same rights as shareholders at the moment, so they'd have the rights to get the company annual report. They could turn up at the AGM.

"What might happen, for instance, is there could be shareholder associations set up of citizens who own these shares, who will put pressure on the banks to change their behaviour. Banks and all other companies are meant to be owned by their shareholders and to respond to their shareholders' wishes."

The Guardian report says that the Policy Exchange, the influential Conservative think-tank, has now taken up the idea.

In the early months of the Coalition I hoped that the more thoughtful elements of the two parties might find common cause. Perhaps this is one example of that happening?

We trust our spooks - but no one else

Judging by today's Commons statement and questions on GCHQ, while the average Conservative MP does not trust teachers, doctors or the BBC, he or she has an unbreakable faith in our intelligence services. And that faith is shared by the average Labour MP too.

It's not the outlook on life you would hope for in a mature democracy, is it?

Choosing Blue Peter presenters and the fall of Western civilisation

At the time of the controversy over the naming of the new Blue Peter cat - remember Cookiegate? - I wrote:

In my day the Blue Peter cat would have been called whatever Valerie Singleton damned well said it was and that would have been an end of the matter.

Time has moved on. The programme no longer has pets for the nation's children to enjoy, but now they get to choose its presenters.

BBC News reports:

Each episode of Blue Peter - You Decide! will see the contenders tackle a series of challenges reflecting things they may be asked to do as a presenter on the show. 

The judges will eliminate one person each week until three make it into the final, where the winner will be chosen by CBBC viewers.

As I wrote when Blue Peter announced it was to have no more pets on screen:

In the 1960s Blue Peter's presenters were undoubtedly on your side, but they knew lots of interesting things that you didn't and shared them with you. You don't make good children's television simply by giving children what they think they want - you end up with Tiswas if you do that.

A reader replies: Oh come off it! This is just "why oh why oh why?" stuff.

Liberal England insists: You mark my words: what we are seeing is the decline and fall of Western civilisation  - possibly by next Tuesday.

Tim Yeo to sue himself for libel

Mr Tim Yeo, Conservative MP for and South Suffolk and Chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, has announced his intention to sue himself for libel.

“I am going to nail my own ass,” he told a Liberal England reporter.

He described his statement "If you want to meet the right people, I can facilitate all those introductions and I use the knowledge I get from what is quite an active network of connections" as "wholly untrue".

“I was particularly shocked by my assent to the proposition that this included ‘Government figures’,” he added.

“Moreover, my suggestion that I said, of the managing director of GB Railfreight, ‘I told him in advance what to say. Ha-ha’ is a gross libel. I would never end anything  by saying ‘ha-ha’. Ha-ha.”

Joanna Newsom: This Side of the Blue

I chose a Joanna Newsom song, Baby Birch, back in 2010 and here is another. This Side of the Blue is best known for its use in an Orange commercial that seemed to be aimed at getting us to use our phones less.

This Side of the Blue, which is taken from her 2004 album The Milk-Eyed Mender, seems to begin in the classroom and ends who knows where.

As I heard Guy Garvey point out on BBC Radio 6, no one bothered to remove the hum from the electric piano at the beginning and end, but you wouldn't be without it now.

Washington Post backs away from its PRISM story

In Britain it was the Guardian that broke the PRISM story. But, while we liberals have been getting outraged and William Hague has been telling us that if we have done nothing wrong we have nothing to hide, strange things have been happening in America.

There the story was broken by the Washington Post and, reports Ed Bott, odd things have been happening to its coverage:

And then a funny thing happened the next morning. If you followed the link to that story, you found a completely different story, nearly twice as long, with a slightly different headline. The new story wasn’t just expanded; it had been stripped of key details, with no acknowledgment of the changes. That updated version, time-stamped at 8:51 AM on June 7, backed off from key details in the original story. 

Crucially, the Post removed the “knowingly participated” language and also scrubbed a reference to the program as being “highly classified.” In addition, a detail in the opening graf that claimed the NSA could “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” was changed to read simply “track foreign targets.”

Bott goes on to suggest that the Post took a leaked PowerPoint presentation from a single anonymous source and rushed to publication because it was afraid that other publications would get the story too:

The Post compounded its error by quietly correcting its story and not publicly acknowledging that there were errors in the original story. In fact, the revised story still claims the NSA and the FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers” of those companies when that allegation no longer appears to be true. 

In short, one of the great journalistic institutions of the 20th Century is now engaged in outright click-baiting, following the same “publish first, fact-check later” rules as its newer online competitors.

Derek Acorah cancels performance "due to unforeseen circumstances"

Thanks to The Daily Edge.

Welland Valley Beer Festival

I have spent the day enjoying the Welland Valley Beer Festival - nine pubs, stretching from Great Bowden on the edge of Market Harborough to Lyddington in Rutland, served by a relay of vintage buses. How can you not enjoy that? The buses also call at Market Harborough station, so it is easy to reach it from further afield.

I visited the Talbot Inn at Gretton, the Wheel & Compass at Weston by Welland and the Queen's Head at Sutton Bassett. In between I found some things to photograph and even had a walk between those last two villages, though that is the shortest between participating pubs apart from the two in Lyddington,which really would have been cheating.

As to the beer, I rather liked Biggus Dickus from Nobby's Brewery at Guilsborough - and not just for the name. And I enjoyed listening to The Others at the Queen's Head.

PRISM: Should we believe the internet companies' denials?

The Guardian has revealed that the American National Security Agency is collecting data from internet providers and other companies. Yet Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple have all denied being party to such an arrangement.

Writing on The Daily Beast, Megan McArdle says their are five possible explanations:

1. The companies are lying;
2. Only a few people in the company know about this, and they aren't issuing the statements;
3. The Post and the Guardian are wrong and have been duped;
4. PRISM was operating without the knowledge of the companies;
5. The companies know, and those statements are very carefully worded.

Which does she favour?

All of these are in some way unbelievable. #1 is asking for a class action suit that destroys your company. #3 involves some very suspicious national security reporters at two different outlets simultaneously getting duped. And #2 strikes me as extremely unlikely. I can imagine one rogue employee doing this without telling his employers. I cannot imagine the exact same thing happening at nine of the biggest internet companies. 

The most likely possibilities seem to be #4 or #5: the NSA is filtering this stuff at some point outside the companies, or the companies have issued some very, very carefully worded statements.

Railway Roundabout: Fort William to Mallaig

This film was first broadcast in 1958, long before Harry bloody Potter was born.

Six of the Best 359

"Was the Communications Data Bill just a cover for PRISM data?", asks Complicity.

Writing on the Northampton Liberal Democrats site, Richard Church remembers Tony Rounthwaite, who died at the end of May: "Brian Markham, who was elected in 1985 to the County Council said 'If you have ever asked yourself why there have been Liberal and Liberal Democrat Councillors in Northampton for the last 30 years when they have been few and far between in say Wellingborough or Kettering, the answer very largely was Tony Rounthwaite'."

Ferdinand Mount reviews four books about Margaret Thatcher for the TLS.

The centenary of the death of Emily Wilding Davidson is marked by an online exhibition hosted by the LSE Digital Library.

An audience of more than 200 enjoyed a debate on "Richard III: Benevolent King or Murderous Tyrant?" at the University of Leicester last night.

Bill Mankin writes for No Depression on "We Can All Join In: How rock festivals helped change America" - nice Traffic references there, sir: "The sensation of strength-in-numbers could be exhilarating. For individuals from far-flung high schools who otherwise felt like – or were treated like – they were weirdoes, freaks or outcasts, it was a relief to have a place where they could let their guards down and ‘do their own thing’. Authority figures were few and far between, and incense and pot smoke wafted on the breeze to enhance the sensory experience and give things an extra edge of rebellion."

Remembering Tom Sharpe

I was sorry to hear of the death of the comic novelist Tom Sharpe. I read him avidly when I was a student and recall that in those far-off days he was taken very seriously by the critics. As Robert McCrum says in his tribute on the Guardian Books Blog: "For a while, he was spoken of as the heir to Wodehouse and Waugh."

Sharpe wrote his first two novels about South Africa and his violent comic sensibility was conditioned by the cruelty and absurdity of life there. In Britain he found his most rewarding targets in our ancient institutions, which half attracted and half appalled him.

My own favourite is Blott on the Landscape, in part because of its Shropshire setting. It was adapted for television in 1985 and featured terrific performances from the then little-known David Suchet and Geraldine James.

I was going to post a clip from it, but can only find complete episodes, which would be cheating. So buy the DVD.